The Long Flight From Tyranny

Firsthand accounts of Burma's refugees, living difficult half-lives on a dangerous borderland

By

Philip Delves Broughton

Updated May 14, 2010 12:01 a.m. ET

Reading about modern Burma can be an ordeal—like a journey into the abyss. The situation in this godforsaken country is so dire—and the result of such dunderheaded thuggery—that you wonder why you do it to yourself. On the upside, at least you're not living there.

The many refugees who live along the Thai-Burma border—would-be escapees from the military-socialist regime that has ruled in Burma since 1962—aren't quite living there either. But given their seemingly endless state of near statelessness, they may as well be. The refugees are victims of the Burmese government's war on political opponents and on ethnic groups within the country, notably the Karen, who have been fighting for autonomy ever since Burma was granted independence from Britain in 1948.

ENLARGE

In June 2009, civilians take shelter along the Moei River separating Thailand and Burma as they try to escape the fighting between the Burmese army and Karen guerrillas.
Associated Press

The Karen conflict has waxed and waned in intensity over the years, but the past couple of decades have been especially grim. The Burmese military has sought to purge the country of Karen using every debased tool at their disposal, from burning down villages to committing systematic rape.

As Mac McClelland writes in "For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question" (Soft Skull Press, 388 pages, $15.95), a sophistic argument continues over whether the government's purge constitutes genocide. "Or as my father put it when I tried to impress upon him the seriousness of the situation in Burma, 'but how does it compare to Sudan?' " She makes a convincing case that Burma and Sudan are not so far apart on the horror scale.

But Ms. McClelland has done more than write another broad catalog of misery. She has a tale to tell. She arrived in a Burmese refugee camp in northern Thailand in 2006 to teach English for a few weeks. A profane young bisexual from Ohio, she finds herself living with a group of prim, trim Karen men who spend their days monitoring Burmese atrocities and their nights competing in push-up contests. Quickly she discovers why the Far Eastern Economic Review dubbed the Karen "the world's most pleasant and civilized guerrilla group."

It is a fantastic clash of cultures, which Ms. McClelland describes with saucy relish. The men are initially resistant to her exuberance and warmth and then fascinated by it. She is in turn fascinated by their combination of naïveté and experience. They may not know about French kissing—preferring a form of kissing that involves a rub of the nose followed by a sharp sniff—but they can navigate their way through a jungle to evade the murderous Burmese army. Her writing is so vivid that you can almost smell the frying pork, the cigarettes and, alas, the overflowing latrines.

Ms. McClelland weaves into her tale a detailed, irreverent modern history of Burma that scythes through many of the arguments dictating the policy of other countries toward the Burmese government. Sanctions, she writes, may be well-intentioned, but they produce all kinds of unintended effects, such as forcing Burmese textile workers out of their jobs and into the sex industry. And while the West bleats, Asian countries—notably China, Singapore and South Korea—are more than happy to do business with Burma. As long as there is money to be made in Burma, she says, "there's unlikely to be a cohesive or constructive policy of international financial disengagement."

ENLARGE

Ms. McClelland credits Condoleezza Rice who, as secretary of state, in 2006 opened the door for more Karen to leave the squalid camps in Thailand and emigrate to the U.S. They are grateful for the chance at a new life, Ms. McClelland notes; but they are also struggling to accept that their dream of returning home to an independent Karen state is fading.

Zoya Phan is a Karen who was born in a jungle village in 1980 but fled as a child to the Thai border camps. Her mother was a guerrilla soldier and her father a pro-democracy activist who was murdered at his home in Thailand in 2008, allegedly by the Burmese government. Ms. Phan was fortunate to receive an Open Society Institute scholarship that saved her from the refugee camps and allowed her to study in Bangkok and later England, where she now lives.

"Undaunted" (Free Press, 284 pages, $26) is an unremittingly wretched memoir of how Ms. Phan's family was chased from its home by the Burmese army into the refugee camps, where thousands of people have spent years with no way out, prey to the weather, violent guards and the constant fear of Burmese reprisals. If you have ever doubted the value of Western aid to such refugees, this book will change your mind. When everything was darkest for Ms. Phan, it was help from the West that gave her hope. As she writes: "I am one of the lucky ones. I am lucky I am still alive. I am lucky I haven't been raped. I am lucky that I am not still in a refugee camp with no work, no freedom. . . . I don't want you to feel sorry for me, I want you to feel angry, and I want you to do something about it."

Emma Larkin's "Everything Is Broken" (Penguin Press, 271 pages, $25.95) follows her 2005 book, "Finding George Orwell in Burma," an account of her journey through modern Burma searching for traces of Orwell's time there as a policeman in the 1920s. It's hard to find any shafts of light in this one. An American journalist who writes under a pseudonym, she returned to Burma in 2008 after the cyclone Nargis had killed nearly 140,000 people and devastated swaths of the country. She entered Burma as a tourist but managed to move from village to village meeting victims of the hurricane and of the government's inept response. Given how difficult it was for foreign governments and aid groups to penetrate Burma at the time, Ms. Larkin pulls off a formidable piece of reporting. She also does a good job of decoding the generals who run Burma, who seem driven by paranoia, mysticism and a firm belief in the jackboot as a cure-all.

Karen Connelly's "Burmese Lessons" (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 382 pages, $27.95) is a memoir of Ms. Connelly's affair with a Burmese resistant whom she meets on a reporting assignment to the Thai border in the mid-1990s. "Burmese Lessons" (which follows a superb novel by Ms. Connelly called "The Lizard Cage," about Burma's political prisoners) is a polished, literary memoir that includes, along the way, an account Burma's turbulent history. The book has a bit too much of the conscience-stricken Westerner swooning over the dark-skinned rebel, but Ms. Connelly is a hugely engaging writer. Burma itself—as Ms. Connelly well knows—is rather more complicated than one difficult love affair.

—Mr. Delves Broughton is the author of "Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School."

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